This site is a sort of museum in cyberspace full of odds and ends about life in Budleigh Salterton.
It celebrates among other things the connection between our corner of East Devon - birthplace of both Sir Walter Raleigh and Roger Conant, founder of Salem, Massachusetts - and the United States of America.
The site was inspired by the friendship link established in 2001 with the Cape Cod community of Brewster.

Monday, 30 December 2013

The River Otter is always a popular subject for
artists and the view of Otter Head is a favourite.

Mark Gibbons is a
professional painter who specialises in West Country moorland and coastal landscapes.
His 1980 watercolour of the River Otter at Budleigh Salterton was one of the
recent lots at Piers Motley Auctions in Exmouth.

Just over two years
ago the artist and his wife Angela featured as contestants in the ITV programme
‘May the Best House Win.’The subsequent
media coverage led to increased interest in his paintings, which were reported
as selling for around £500 each.

And the above painting...?A snip at £50 at the Bicton Street sale on 9 December.
Auctioneer Piers Motley said that the winning bid was what he would have
expected.

Tuesday, 24 December 2013

The madness of war: A Swiss shepherd watches a battle on the frontier during World War I from the 1915 edition of Some ‘Frightful’ War Pictures by the celebrated illustrator William Heath Robinson (1872-1944)

Museums up and down the country -
indeed throughout the world - will have been bringing their resources to bear
on exhibitions marking the centenary of World War I. In Britain, Prime
Minister David Cameron announced last October that more than £50m has been allocated
for a historic commemoration of the centenary of the start of the conflict.

The hunt is still on at Fairlynch Museum
for Great War stories with a link to Budleigh Salterton or any of the villages
of the Lower Otter Valley.

Those stories based on
experiences of active service are naturally of keen interest, particularly when
they reveal private thoughts at variance with the official views promoted by
the Government’s propaganda machine. Only a few months ago the publication of
Warwickshire man and WW1 veteran Harry Drinkwater’s pencil-written secret
wartime diaries made BBC news. His papers had been sent for auction by
relatives following his death in 1978 and were spotted by collector David
Griffiths who was struck by their gripping storytelling style.

One of many
entries from Lt Drinkwater’s diary reflects bitterly on the futility of the
conflict:

"This
is not war it's slaughter. No man, however brave, can advance against a sheet
of bullets from the front and a shower of shells from overhead - it appears to
me that the side who will win will be the one who can supply the last
man." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24745574

Less dramatic
perhaps but absorbing in their way are the diaries kept by non-combatants such
as John Coleman Binder, a grocer, baker and corn-dealer from Oundle in
Northamptonshire. Recently published by the town’s Museum Trust they cover in detail
a wide range of aspects of World War I.

Editor
Alice Thomas was at first hesitant about bringing them to public notice but
decided that publishing them was a worthwhile project. “Though I have sometimes
thought that it might be better to let these terrible events, with the hatred,
brutality and suffering on both sides, be forgotten, they were an inescapable
part of life for everyone involved, and a part of our history,” she writes in
the preface. “A first hand account such as this is a valuable and vivid record
of how life was for this thoughtful Oundle man in his fifties, in the years
between 1914 and 1918.”

Oundle School Chapel was built as a memorial to those former pupils of Oundle School who died during World War I, including the Headmaster's son Roy Sanderson

Having
spent over 30 years living and working in Mr Binder’s charming town before
moving to Budleigh Salterton I was surprised and delighted to receive a copy
sent by Oundle friends involved with the local museum. Maybe they were pleased with me for spotting that Alfred Leete (1882-1933) the designer of the famous Kitchener 'Your Country Needs You' recruiting poster, was born in the village of Achurch just a few miles south of Oundle.

It’s
a long way from Devon to Northamptonshire but
I’m in the habit of spotting curious connections from the past. Like the fact
that General Simcoe, a one-time resident of Budleigh Salterton, about whom I’ve
written at length on this blog, was born at Cotterstock, near Oundle before
moving with his family to Exeter.

A scene from chapter LXIV of François Rabelais' Gargantua telling in burlesque fashion an episode from the story of the Pichrocholine war, illustrated by the 19th century French artist Gustave Doré

I’ve often
thought about the stupidity and sadness of human conflict, whether finding
pacifist elements in the work of 16th century authors like the humanist
scholarErasmus of Rotterdam or the
French comic writer Francois Rabelais...

This depiction of the battlefield of Waterloo by the artist John Heaviside Clarke (1771-1863) was dedicated to the Marquess of Anglesea, Wellington's cavalry commander

... or
being struck by the absence of jingoism in this 1816 painting of the aftermath
of Waterloo

The book Oundle’s War was my contribution to the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was a history of the 1939-45 conflict seen from the viewpoints of Oundle residents, former pupils of Oundle School, and USAAF servicemen stationed in the local area

... or
writing about World War Two’s impact on the Oundle community between 1939 and
1945.

Flicking
through Mr Binder’s diary at random I found something of note on every page - and there are 268 pages in total.
Here is this worthy shopkeeper describing on page 2 how his Oundle customers
reacted to news of the impending declaration of war in August 1914.

“I am sorry
to say that this morning signs of panic began to show themselves. On commencing
business people commenced to come in with large orders to buy up food
especially flour and sugar. I quickly discerned this and refused to supply any
person with more than 14lb of Flour or 14lb Sugar and thus although we
continued to be very busy all day we were able to cope with the rush.

I am sorry
to say this course was not taken by other shops in the town, so that some
people were able to secure an unfair quantity of Provisions.”

Above: A 1915 World War I poster appealing for volunteers

Britain had begun the Great War in 1914 by
relying on volunteers for its armed forces. By 1916 the Government was
introducing conscription, but Mr Binder had reservations about its plans for
calling up working men who were already contributing, as he saw it, to the
national effort.

“The burden laid upon this empire is already stupendous, and
cannot be added to without the gravest reasons,” he writes on page 95. “We are
helping clear the seas. We have an army of 3 millions of men fighting on two
fronts. We are keeping our trade going (under conditions which are intolerable)
in order to finance ourselves and our Allies, and have practically turned all
our steel and iron works of every description into munition factories in order
to supply their wants and our own. If we withdraw our men compulsorily from
these labours it seems to me the result will be collapse. I am neither an
Optimist nor a Pessimist but simply a plain citizen who tries to look at these
events in the light of reason. We are told the Voluntary System has proved a
failure, that we are ‘a nation of slackers’ etc., etc. This is mere rubbish. No
nation that supplies and equips an army of 3 millions in a year ought to be
condemned in this way.”

A year
later, with men being sent to the front in their thousands, he is clearly
revolted by the indiscriminate way in which the cannon-fodder was being chosen.
“One of the most painful and shameful debates that I ever remember took place
on Thursday in the House on the question of calling up for re-examination men
who had been rejected as unfit. Many of these men - notoriously unfit - have
been passed by Medical Boards as fit for General Service. The whole affair had
become a crying public scandal.” (page 215).

Yet Mr Binder is no pacifist. “We cannot wage war in kid gloves with an enemy like Germany,” he concludes on page 214 having described a terrible air raid on London which took place on 13 June 1917, when 104 people - “a good part women and children” he notes - were killed, and 243 wounded. “One cannot understand their mentality at all, and Englishmen have long ceased to try to do so, and most of us now look upon them as real savages, but unfortunately they have been able to bring science to aid their savage and bloody ways.”

As I turn
the pages of the Oundle shopkeeper’s diary I wonder how many volumes of diaries
and letters still lie undisturbed in East Devon homes, and how many of them
might perhaps have been composed a century ago during what Mr Binder describes so rightly as “this grim and
bloody war.”Well, we have four
years ahead of us to contemplate its horrors. And perhaps during that time Fairlynch
Museum’s 2014 tribute to
the victims of the Great War may help to yield more testimonies which deserve
to be better known.

So please don’t throw away those old
family papers and notebooks before checking to see if there’s something as
valuable as Mr Binder’s diary.

Saturday, 14 December 2013

I enjoyed visiting the current exhibition at Exeter’s
Royal Albert Memorial
Museum a few days ago.
It’s called ‘West Country to World’s End - The South West in the Tudor Age’ and
I’ll write more about it in due course.

A well produced book of the same title accompanies the exhibition,
which I enjoyed so much that I bought a copy.

Budleigh people will admire the impressively life-size portrait by
an unknown artist of the area’s great Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh and
his eight-year-old son Walter. On loan from the National Portrait Gallery the
work was painted in 1602 when he was enjoying Queen Elizabeth’s favour, and
shows in great detail, as the printed commentary explains, the expensive
clothes worn by father and son: Sir Walter is wearing a jacket embroidered with
seed pearls while the boy’s blue suit is silver-braided. This link on the excellent and useful Wikipedia will take you to see it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WalterRaleighandson.jpg

But why is there no mention of Sir Walter’s birthplace in East
Budleigh, only a 30 minute drive from Exeter?

The 2010 guide to All Saints, one of Devon's most celebrated churches

And while much of the exhibition gives rightful prominence to the magnificence
and sophistication of arts and crafts enjoyed by rich and powerful patrons in
16th century South West England there is surprisingly not one image or mention of
one of the glories of East Budleigh in All Saints Church where Sir Walter Raleigh
and his family worshipped.

“It is not Raleigh that makes this church a ‘must-visit’, nor even
the very beautiful gilded bosses, but the wonderful 16th-century carved bench
ends,” writes Hilary Bradt in her 2010 book Slow
Devon and Exmoor. “These are quite extraordinary, and deserve as much time
as you can give them.”

Nearer home, another admirer of the bench ends is Fairlynch Museum volunteer steward Hanneke Coates
whose illustrations in the 2010 booklet All
Saints Church and the Village of East Budleigh show some of the carvings in
good detail.

as a ‘wodewose’
or ‘wildman of the woods’, a figure often known as a Green Man with ancient
links to natural vegetative deities in cultures from earliest times in places
around the world. That view seems to be shared by David Jenkinson, writing
about the East Budleigh bench ends for the
Otter Valley Association’s Ovapedia in 2010 where he describes the
carvers as influenced by the threatening mythical creatures of the Dark Ages,
including such examples as the wodewose and boggarts or malevolent spirits of
the fields.Click on http://www.ova.org.uk/index.php?page=The-Carved-Bench-ends-of-All-Saints-Church-East-Budleigh-C16
to read more.

However Rex
Harris or Sheepdog Rex as he calls himself, also acknowledges that the bench
end is “often referred to as a Red
Indian because of (the) Raleigh
connection.” That
was the view taken by Budleigh Salterton’s Dr Brushfield in his 1892 study of
the Church of All Saints. “A large bearded head in
profile, facing left, situated in the concavity of an arabesque ornament, and
terminating in a scroll-like decoration,” he wrote. “It bears some resemblance
to, and has been called, the decorated head of an Indian.”

“It’s hard not
to think ‘Red Indian!” writes in a similar vein the Devon-based founder of the
Bradt Travel Guides, having described the figure on the bench end wearing what
seems to be a feathered headdress. “A sailor returning from the New World
would have remembered the more flamboyant aspects and perhaps described them to
local craftsmen,” suggests Hilary Bradt. “But the ‘feathers’ could also be
foliage,” she admits in deference to the Green Man’s followers.

It’s a view shared by
Hanneke in her 2010 church guide. In fact she is passionate in what she
describes as the belief held by locals - and she counts herself as such - that
the bench end depicts a North American Indian.“That of course is completely different from what the historians write,”
she says. “But I’ve spent a long time studying and drawing the bench ends and I
know them intimately.”

The difference in
interpretation of the carvings by locals as opposed to historians is for
Hanneke a fascinating aspect of the East Budleigh
bench ends. “I’d love to write a booklet on that subject,” she told me.

It’s easy to
embrace the notion that the whole of Tudor Devon was abuzz with stories told in
towns and villages by sailors returning from voyages to the ‘World’s End’ led
by Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh. Dr Michael Tisdall has devoted many years to
studying the significance of the
carvings of plants and leaves in medieval churches. His book God’s Flowers: an iconography for foliage
decoration was published last year.

Many visitors to
East Budleigh will have learnt that this bench
end depicts a tongue-sticker. It may have been a carver’s depiction of a
tale-bearer punished for his sin by being given an enormous deformed tongue. Or
simply a fairground-type freakshow.

Dr Tisdall, quoted
by Hilary Bradt, has a rather different view. “It is my idea that it is a
banana. Bananas would have been known to Raleigh’s
crew. They sailed via the Azores where bananas were in production and some were
taken across to these new West Indies and
planted there. So either a banana or a drawing or other memory of a banana
would be very likely in East Budleigh.”

Well, I don’t know. But it’s fun to let the imagination range
across the seas and the centuries.

And the RAMM exhibition can only help.Do go, and don’t miss the exhibit described
as a 17th century tile depicting a Native American, found in the little North
Devon village of Monkleigh.

I mean of course, the tile. Now that would be a story wouldn’t it,
to discover that the All Saints bench end craftman’s work had been carved from
life?

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

Living as we do on the coast, it’s all too easy to think that Devon’s all about seaside holiday resorts, smugglers’ coves, sea shanties and swashbuckling nautical heroes of the past. So the subject of a talk on 26 November in Knowle Village Hall was well chosen by the Otter Valley Association, given the importance of mill power over the centuries in our corner of the West Country.

And they couldn’t have chosen a better speaker than
Martin Watts from Cullompton. One of only thirteen practising millwrights
listed in the Mills section of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, he wasable to draw on his many years’ experience as a miller
and student of mills since the 1960s. With an impressive range of slides and a
seemingly endless supply of facts about rivers, leats, millstones, gearing,
overshot and undershot wheels he kept his 60-strong audience fascinated by his
story of how the ancient industry of milling had developed since the Middle
Ages, with a special emphasis on East Devon.

The entrance to Otterton Mill shop and gallery and the mill workings

There had been, we learnt, about 2,000 mill sites in Devon over the last thousand years. The Domesday Book
commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085 had listed 96 mills in the
county, mostly in East Devon. Cornwall, in contrast, had only six. And
milling had thrived until quite recently. Only 30 years there were still 600
corn mills; contributions from various members of the audience at the end of the
talk proved that milling memories were still fresh in people’s minds - elderly though some of these may have been.

The OtterValley was an especially
productive area, including mills at Ottery St Mary, Dotton, Colaton Raleigh and
especially Otterton. In fact, if you missed the talk, and haven’t visited this
most celebrated mill so close to Budleigh there are plenty of opportunities to
see it in action. The photos don't really do it justice.

The mill building at Otterton sits astride the mill leat, and houses two
independent mills sharing the same stream. There are two water-wheels, which
would previously have driven two pairs of milling stones housed in each mill.

With a total of four pairs of stones, Otterton Mill was for much of its life
the largest watermill in Devon. The millers grind their signature
stoneground flour twice a month and on milling days are very happy to chat to
visitors and explain how the mill works.

There’s much more than milling to
enjoy at Otterton, fascinating though it is to watch those amazing wheels going
round. With its idyllic setting, award-winning cafe-restaurant, celebrated
bakery, art gallery, local food shop and live music events it’s one of East Devon’s major attractions. Click on
http://www.ottertonmill.com to find out more.

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

Mulled wine in the Museum, mulled
cider in a marquee just opposite in Mackerel Square, with live music to listen
to and chorizo casserole to warm you up...and lots more going on in the High Street including the traditional
carol-singing of course. You can’t complain that Budleigh isn’t doing its best
to cater for all tastes at the Late Night Shopping event on 6 December, from 6.00 to 8.00 pm.

Budleigh in Business is hosting the marquee in Mackerel Square, pictured above.
The location seems particularly apt, being the town’s market
place in the 18th century.

Newly formed in 2012 and now
boasting 70+ members, Budleigh in Business describes itself as a group of like
minded people dedicated to developing the businesses and prosperity of Budleigh
Salterton and the surrounding area by supporting the town and helping business
thrive.

With ‘Buy Local’ as the theme, BiB is
planning its second Food & Drink Festival
which is returning in 2014 from 24 to 26 October following the success of this
year’s gastro-extravaganza.

There’s nothing insular about the
group. Most of its members are based in the Budleigh area - the chorizo
casserole for example comes courtesy of Rosehill Rooms and Cookery, based on
Budleigh’s West Hill. But the mulled
cider is from the Ashcombe Estate near Dawlish, where Budleigh resident Bill
Roper is helping to revive the centuries-old tradition of cider-making. While
on the subject of food there’s a delicious-looking recipe on the Ashcombe Cider
web page at http://www.ashcombecider.co.uk/moules.html

“We know that many of you will be either part of the
late night opening or there with family and friends to enjoy the festive spirit
on the High Street - it would be lovely for you to join us down in Mackerel
Square!” says BiB Chairperson Angela Yarwood, seen left.

About Me

Born in 1946, in Birmingham UK, of Scottish-Irish parentage, and brought up as a Roman Catholic. Early education may have driven me into teaching, in the belief that schools should offer a more enjoyable experience for children. Studied French at London University, specialising in 16th century literature. Then came 34 years of teaching French, along with red herrings and common sense, at Oundle School, Northamptonshire. Published articles in Etudes Rabelaisiennes, (a long time ago), and a couple of books - one big 'Oundle's War' (1995) - and one small 'The Scientist in The Cottage' (2013) - a biography of Henry Carter FRS (1813-95). Dabbles, and some people say meddles, in many areas. A passionate gardener, moved to Devon partly to grow ericaceous plants more easily. Other interests include family, cycling, walking, photography, reading, music, studying butterflies, chopping wood, DIY, playing on the scaffold tower, and networking for the Greater Good. Married to Anthea for over 40 years. Three children: Emily, Simeon and Rosanna, three granddaughters and two Bengal cats. Like an increasing number of my friends of my generation, I'm a cancer survivor – I hope!